Conservative humorist Greg Gutfield recently announced his intention to build an "Islamic gay bar" next to the planned Islamic community center near Ground Zero as an attempt to "reduce deadly homophobia in the Islamic world." Conservatives previously arguing that the Park 51 project was somehow a desecration of hallowed ground are suddenly ecstatic about the idea of adult entertainment on the premises. Of course, it's not as though the "hallowed ground" near Ground Zero lacks for adult entertainment already. There are already two strip clubs in the area. Faisal Rauf and Daisy Khan are probably aware of the one about a block away from where the proposed Park 51 project will be.
It seems immediately obvious Gutfield's stunt isn't very sincere. An effort to persuade the religious homophobes that gays and lesbians are real human beings with rights that must be recognized demands a more potent tool for advocacy than the ickiness of buttsex. But that's the inherent moral myopia that comes with basing your sense of morals on reactionary spite.
No, there aren't going to be any liberals clamoring for the government to interfere and stop Gutfield, but the reason this annoys liberals -- and should bother everyone else -- is because it's ultimately just a less honest version of what Gingrinch and company are doing. Gutfield is couching his statement in a joke for the purpose of deniability, but basically what he's saying is that Imam Faisal Rauf, Daisy Khan, and the Muslim community that would be served by the Park 51 project and worldwide are collectively responsible for the ill-treatment of gays in any Muslim country in the world. By logical extension, Muslims also bear collective responsibility for al-Qaeda and terrorism, which is precisely why there should be no Islamic community center near Ground Zero, and why Gutfield is doing this in first place. We all bear responsibility for policing the communities we self-identify with, but this obviously isn't the same thing. In that spirit, it might be more appropriate for Gutfield to do some LGBT-rights outreach at his current place of employment.
Beyond the obvious constitutional implications of demanding the government violate someone's right to freedom of religion, this assumption of collective guilt was what made liberals angry about the conservative response to the project: The notion that any individual Muslim anywhere bears some personal responsibility for any atrocity committed in the name of Islam and should be punished accordingly. You might as well hold Americans collectively responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, or the accidental civilian deaths caused by drone strikes.
Of course, that's what Faisal Shahzad was thinking when he placed an amateurish explosive device in Times Square that was discovered by Senegalese Muslim immigrant Aliou Niasse. If conservatives could look beyond the same capricious moral tribalism driving their abandonment of constitutional principles any time Muslims are involved, they'd notice that this argument is different only in degree from the extremist narrative that the deaths of innocents are justified, because among their declared enemies, there are no innocents.
